Headline
by LilyGhost
Summary: Stephanie puts a face - and a person - to a story she spots in the newspaper.


**All familiar characters belong to Janet. The mistakes are mine.**

" _Son of a bitch,_ " I said in horror and equal parts disgust.

"What?" Ranger asked me.

I was skimming over the paper that still gets delivered here because Ella believes no breakfast tray is complete without a newspaper even though most people use their phones for everything now. Ranger was close enough to hear my exclamation. Today is a rare occasion, he doesn't often get to call it an early day and we were enjoying it by relaxing together on the couch. He was stretched out with his back against the arm of it. I was stretched out, too, but my position is way better because my body gets to recline between his legs with his chest cushioning my back. This evening had been perfect up until I read one particular headline.

I held up the newspaper so he could read the bold print. " **Local Woman's Body Found, Strangled, Behind Dumpster"**. I knew this woman. I met her when I'd gone after a skip wanted on a drug charge. That skip just so happened to be her boyfriend at the time. She seemed nice and surprisingly normal considering what I would soon learn about her. I had no clue what she originally saw in the idiot, but she _helped me_ instead of _hiding him_ so I assumed she'd given him up long before I came along.

"Was she one of your FTAs?" He asked, putting the contract he'd been reading down on the coffee table, correctly sensing that I'm upset about this.

"No. Her _Mr. Right Now_ was. A few days after that apprehension, I heard through Connie's grapevine that she'd moved out of their apartment while he was still locked up and couldn't stop her."

I already have the behind the scenes scoop on this particular story. Brenna Turney was a good person who had been dealt a really crappy life. Because of her shitty circumstances, she'd been forced to run away more than once, and was apparently taken away for good the time.

I must be PMSy. I had to sniffle back a few unexpected tears as I remembered the hour I spent talking to her while we waited for the boyfriend to show up after she helped me track him down by phone and set a capture-trap for him.

"Tell me about her," Ranger said, knowing I needed to talk.

"She was a sweet, quiet person who didn't purposely get into trouble or put herself in danger," I began, picturing how lifeless and dull her brown eyes were when she told me what led up to her living with a drug user and occasional pusher.

"Was she the woman who surprised you by helping rather than hindering a capture. Bill Effing was the boyfriend?"

"Yeah. I found out just how fitting that name was. He was an 'effing' jerk to both of us when I was cuffing him."

"She wasn't into drugs herself?" He asked.

I shook my head against him. "She was totally against them. She ran away from home at thirteen because her mother and the mother's boyfriend of the week were addicts."

"Did she say why she hooked herself up with the same life she purposely left?"

I shrugged. "If you don't know how to fix something in your life, you end up repeating it until you figure it out. What he gave her was familiar. It was all she knew. When she was a kid, she'd gone back home after a week of staying with friends or worse. She stuck it out and stayed out of the way so she could at least graduate. She was kicked out officially on her eighteenth birthday. Being declared a legal adult had her 'mom' more than happy to agree. There weren't ever any warm and fuzzy maternal feelings, but things came to a head that day when Brenna wouldn't hand over her paycheck to her mother. The poor kid got a crash course in growing up. She didn't have a Grandma Mazur to run to, no college dorm to hide out at, not much hope for the future, so she wound up bussing tables at God awful hours, starving more days than not, and fighting to keep what she did manage to have."

"How did she go from escaping her FTA boyfriend to landing in the paper?"

I felt nauseous as I mentally pieced together the awful last moments of Brenna's life that the paper can't help but report and exploit. I should be used to death in all its forms by now, but this one feels personal. I never forgot her and I would've helped her had I known she was still struggling. Ranger tightened the arm he'd put around me and took the paper out of my hands so I'd stop staring at the too-young, too-thin face looking sadly back at me.

"The police said they found a ticket out of town in her belongings, so I guess she was relocating again and chose the cheapest way to do it. Just from one glance at her, you could tell she wasn't enjoying life, but she wasn't giving up on it either. It doesn't seem right that people like Scrog and Con are alive ... and a woman like her dies for being in the wrong place at the worst possible time."

"Life isn't fair, Babe."

"I know. And that really fucking sucks."

"It does," he said, kissing my curls. "Was there any more information on her?"

" _'Sources close to the victim_ ' say she was staying temporarily with another waitress but there was an altercation involving that woman's boyfriend ... so Brenna was told to leave again. She was probably sick of how this city treated her and decided to start her life over somewhere completely different this time. Now she doesn't have one anymore."

"You're not to blame. You tell me all the time that I can't save everyone."

"I know, but ..."

"No, buts."

"She only knew one way to survive ... leave a bad situation while praying like hell for a better one somewhere else. And it got her killed. This could've easily been me when I got fired from my E.E. Martin job and had nothing but a crappy apartment to my name. It still _can be_ me at anytime if I go up against the wrong guy or find myself on Stark Street again."

"It won't ever be _you_. Why do you think I insist on you having backup, a tracker, and a weapon on you, wherever you go?"

"You and the guys are good, but none of us are immortal. Anything can happen at anytime."

"You're right, it can. But if you dwell on that ... you won't have a life to miss."

I suddenly turned on my side in the circle of his arms and he immediately put one booted-foot on the floor so I could cuddle up into him even more.

"That's one way of looking at it," I said, loving and appreciating the way he can find a meaning hidden in just about everything ... even a horrible crime like this one.

"It's the _only_ way to see something like this. I've done many things I'm not especially proud of to keep myself alive. Although I don't like to think about them, or relive them when I'm forced to, I owe the life I have now to every one of them. I would do everything over again if I had to because I wouldn't have wanted to miss out on this _... on you_. She didn't have a chance, but we both were given one ... and we took it. I don't want you feeling guilty or regretting what we have now because someone you knew was given a more troubling life than yours."

"I just wish she would've had someone like you in her corner, then maybe she could've eventually loved being alive, too. Instead, she gets killed in a matter of minutes outside a stupid, dirty bus terminal."

"If she had been heading somewhere new, she could've been filled with excitement and/or happiness just before she died. Focus on that. It's not much, but it _is_ something."

"She did talk briefly about wanting to move out west one day. Maybe she got her wish ... just not a complete one."

"Did they catch the guy?"

"Paper said the police have a face from a surveillance camera in the area. They're asking people to call with any additional information on the unidentified guy or the crime."

"I'll contact the Chief and let him know we'll assist the department anyway we can. He _will_ be found, Babe. And he will pay one way or another."

"It won't bring her back, though."

He kissed my hair again. "No, it won't."

"What kind of person does that to someone? Chokes them to death and then leaves them behind a fucking Dumpster for Christ's sake ... like they didn't mean a damn thing to anyone?" I said, getting angry all over again. "How can Morelli call you and the guys 'crazy' or 'animals' when there are monsters like this running around killing people with the police unable to catch or control them?"

"Morelli wouldn't recognize reality if it walked up to him in a bar and gut-punched him."

"That's true. He used to accuse me of living in my own world, but he only sees what he wants to."

"In both cases, you don't know what's going on in someone's mind until sometimes it's too late. You just have to be thankful that you're the kind of person who can't fathom doing what they've done."

"The police said that what little money Brenna had wasn't even taken," I said, still trying to find something that makes sense in something that is so frickin' senseless.

"Sanity isn't a player in this. This kind of attack only makes sense to the person who committed the act."

"How can someone 'dispose' of an innocent girl like she's a piece of garbage, and then leave her to lie in it afterwards?"

He didn't say anything, just held me tighter until my shaking stopped. It took longer than it should have for someone I'd only known for an hour out of my life. But my body and my conscience were both reacting to the sad fact that once people finish reading the story, Brenna won't matter to anyone except me and Rangeman as we help track down who killed her. To the rest of Trenton, and anyone else who sees the story, she's already just another statistic ... no longer a person.


End file.
